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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (4960)	3/5/2003 5:48:28 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

Hi Neocon - Khidir Hamza is a very interesting character, indeed. When he first demanded asylum in 1994, he was branded a congenital liar by the CIA and refused asylum in the US. It is interesting to see that they have found a use for him now, and they now claim he is a very reliable source of correct information on Iraq. observer.co.uk The whole article is quite interesting, but here is the bit about Khidir Hamza: -------------------------------------------------- What is accepted without question is that until 1990, when he retired from the Iraqi nuclear programme, the US-educated theoretical nuclear physicist was a senior managerial administrator in Saddam's secret bombmaking programme, which included six months in 1987 spent in charge of the programme. What troubles his former supporters - now his fiercest critics - is not the valuable information he was able to give. Rather, it is about claims he has subsequently made about programmes and technical issues of which, they believe, he has no direct knowledge. These, they say, are claims driven by a desire to persuade the US that military intervention is the best course. Among his most questionable allegations, they say, are those which have been taken up most forcefully by the US hawks. It is Hamza who insists how close Iraq was to assembling a viable nuclear bomb. It is Hamza who has claimed Iraq was near to building a viable 'radiation weapon'. It is Hamza who was prominent on US television speculating that Iraq had assisted Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in their attacks on 11 September and the later anthrax attacks on the US. One of Hamza's sternest critics is Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and US Marine intelligence officer, who recently switched from being an anti-Saddam hawk to joining the anti-invasion voices after he visited Iraq to make a film. Ritter describes Hamza simply as a 'fraud' who has consistently lied about his importance in Iraq's nuclear programme and his own knowledge of it. Then there is David Albright, Hamza's former mentor in the US and himself a former nuclear inspector involved in assessing the scope of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. 'If Hamza has become a monster,' he told The Observer last week, 'I partly blame myself. He had good information on what he knew about, but where we fell out was that I was concerned he was telling me stuff he had read elsewhere, including stuff he could have read in Time magazine. He was not one of the technical experts on the programme, but I found he was a bright man who picked up things very quickly.' One of the problems, says Albright, was that Hamza was given access in the US to Iraq's own declaration of what its nuclear programme comprised. This was provided in the mid-Nineties after another high-level defector disclosed the scope of the Iraqi programme. Hamza, says Albright, was recycling this as his own first-hand knowledge. 'His book is full of technical inaccuracies and there is no doubt he exaggerated his importance. For instance he has a section about the biological weapons programme which he had no knowledge of or access to,' says Albright. Albright believes that Hamza's unreliability can be dated to 1998 when the Clinton administration published its Iraq Liberation Bill, voting funds to depose Saddam. 'From that point on he felt US military action was the only course. He told me he wanted to get a gun himself and go back and fight with his sons. These days he travels with people with a very heavy agenda.' Ritter - whom critics accuse of having become an Iraqi apologist after recent visits to Iraq - believes that Hamza is not alone among defectors sponsored by the INC in singing for his supper. 'In over seven years as a weapons inspector I chased down countless so-called intelligence sources and defector stories saying what Iraq was doing. Most were completely baseless. It is in the nature of the intelligence business that there is an awful lot of crap,' Ritter said. 'The biggest problem you get with defectors is that they often have legitimate tit-bits that are squeezed out in their debriefings. They feel under pressure to say more. So they read up what others have claimed and develop it, saying a cousin or a friend visited such and such a plant and saw such and such a thing, and you end up with a circle of falsehood.' --------------------------------------------------